What do you like best?

Having used other marketing automation products in the past, SharpSpring comes in with a fresh and relevant product, packed full of workflow features that help our marketing team and sales team reach their goals. They are always nes features in planning and SharpSpring are very welcoming of new feature requests.

What do you dislike?

The mobile app is a little basic in terms of full automation access but works well as a CRM when I am travelling.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are in an agency, you should definitely look at SharpSpring as an option. It is Marketing Automation designed for agencies, to learn and work the system well for their benefit.

SharpSpring is user-friendly, but there's a lot of work involved in setting up a marketing automation program that produces results. Ongoing efforts are needed to maintain and update your campaigns, add new ones, and produce regular reports. Make sure you have the personnel in place to nurture the program, while it nurtures your clients.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

As an agency, we are benefiting from streamlining the number of systems we use, saving time for our marketing department. We have been able to replace 4 separate systems with SharpSpring and also know we are GDPR compliant with our client's data.

We also use the system for adding value to the marketing services we offer, by offering the system as a product for our clients to use.

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What do you like best?

As a marketing agency owner, SharpSpring has become a true partner. I have used other marketing platforms in the past and SharpSpring is comparable to just about everything. Their ever-expanding feature set is right in line with the needs I need to run my agency. Before I can request a new feature, it is already on the roadmap.

Second, as an agency partner, the price point has allowed my business to add sources of revenue that I did not have in the past. I can now offer a marketing platform as part of my product offering without drastically increasing my pricing.

What do you dislike?

The time it takes to fully onboard as a client is a little long. An onboarding guide would help move the process along faster.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are an agency owner, you need to jump on the phone and go through the demo. The features that SharpSpring and pricing model will blow you away. We have closed retainers because we could offer a powerful marketing automation system as part of our cost. We could not do that with other software applications.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are using SharpSporing for two things. The first is automating our lead generation. The ability to automate our marketing has helped us do more in less time. Second, we are using SharpSpring to land more clients. We are able to offer new prospects a full-featured marketing platform for a fraction of the cost of other marketing solutions.

SharpSpring has become part of our product offering and will continue to be the go-to software platform for my marketing agency.

What do you like best?

I love how SharpSpring, with just a simple line of code, creates a symbiotic relationship between my sales team and my website. It takes site analytics to a level that gives me data that works for my business.

As a content marketer, I began using SharpSpring for my own business, as well as for several of my clients, because it helps connect the dots in the marketing and sales process. No where else will you find a greater value in a marketing automation platform. If you are going to invest in content creation, and outbound marketing campaigns (be it outbound sales efforts and/or digital advertising) you've got to have an automation machine behind you to increase the return on that investment. SharpSpring is designed to do just that.

What do you dislike?

It takes time to learn--no doubt. I would also like to see some improvements on the mobile app and to have better integration with ThriveThemes--which is the conversion-centric platform I use for my websites and those of my clients.

Recommendations to others considering the product

With power that rivals Hubspot and others but at 1/10th the cost--SharpSpring is a no-brainer.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use SharpSpring to keep prospects from falling between the cracks. That is perhaps one of the most crucial elements of any MA/CRM platform. SharpSpring packs power in BOTH.

What do you like best?

The API is solid, meaning integrating with other platforms is a snap with the help of your dev team. The UI is good and pretty intuitive. A lot of work has gone into the help docs and knowledgebase and you can pretty much learn the platform inside and out that way. This reduces the need for expensive training offered my most competitors. If you do need support, they're responsive and helpful as expected.

What do you dislike?

While the API is great to connect other apps, that's pretty much your only option. Sharpspring does not offer many out of the box connections with other apps. If you don't have dev resources and need something more like an app market for connectors, this might be a problem for you.

Recommendations to others considering the product

We've been using SharpSpring for a couple years. They are truly focused on a roadmap that consistently provides value. We've seen several of our feature requests get implemented over time and that's a great indication of the willingness to work with their clients. The company has solid leadership and is not focused on "being a hubspot alternative". SharpSpring has differentiated themselves and found a true place in the market.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use sharpspring as a customer ourselves as well as an agency, managing client accounts. By far this is the best platform setup for this. Being able to jump around to various accounts with the same login is a great feature. Another excellent feature is the crm. Once you get used to it, it's surprisingly strong and the need for something like Salesforce is negated.

What do you like best?

On the surface it's a copy of Mailchimp with some automation, but it's really a deep automation tool built for enterprise level marketing. It takes quite a learning curve to learn how to use it's extensive powerful tools, but once you do it lacks absolutely nothing feature wise. Send times are fantastic, delivery rates are great and it never fails to send an automated email that is suppose to go out.

What do you dislike?

The learning curve is steep. There is a gigantic stack of features, and abilities, but it's built more like a sandbox where you need to piece it together yourself instead of be guided through it. It requires quite a bit of testing (or more to guess and check) to get the automation working as it should.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Deep tool as long as you utilize the extensive knowledge base and YouTube tutorials to get a head start using it. Don't get discouraged when it looks like it can't do a certain thing, because it really is a box of legos that just needs to be built in the right way and will adapt to almost any marketing automation needs.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketing automation for clients who can collect data and leads through their locations, and be reminded, re-marketed, and organized for optimal customer retention.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring is very dynamic and has been able to do anything we have needed for any of our clients. It is also very user friendly and intuitive. It did not take very long for our staff to be able to use it competently.

I think what we have been most impressed with is the support and the response to our needs to use SharpSpring better.

What do you dislike?

Some of the manual data entry of contacts is a little clunky.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Price was a factor in why we choose SharpSpring but the biggest factor was that we believed we could trust they would become a partner and support us long term, better than other MA companies. We feel like we made the right decision and SharpSpring has lived up to our expectations.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are able to bring all of our data and analytics together and show clients a true ROI on marketing dollars spent. Our agency has been able to gain a substantial competitive advantage over agencies that don't use marketing automation. Our ability to generate leads for clients and show the ROI on those leads is helping us win and keep clients.

What do you like best?

The breadth of the platform. It has all the features you want, need, and didn't even know it had.

Where it lacks in polish, it makes up for in power - no question.

While some might not like how customizable the ENTIRE platform is, it gives you the tools you need to do what you want. If you're expecting to hop in, map some fields, and get automating - you might be a little disappointed. If you're looking to build your dream digital strategy and not be limited by pre-defined fields and automation flows, this is your tool.

If you don't have a team with an Art Director that is comfortable with some HTML, you will likely need a consultant (if you're very particular about email and page design).

What do you dislike?

It's a little clunky and, if I were to nitpick, I could write several pages of change requests for the interface. You enter the platform blind, as nothing is pre-configured - which is a blessing and a curse. While you are not held back by limited automation flows, custom fields, etc, the number of options can be crippling. Also, the WYSIWYG tools are just that and you're going to have to play with them for a while. If you're capable of ripping out some of their code and starting fresh, it'll do what you need.

Also worth noting - in my detailed feature review, most features were knocked a point or two for the interface. It really does have everything you'll probably ever need and it'll help in saving time. While it might not be the best or most polished - it is 100% worth it for the price, especially compared to nearly every other end-to-end service such as this.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you're a massive enterprise, it probably isn't the right solution. If you're a small/medium sized business or a startup that needs to stay in communication with many customers and prospects and would like to be able to edit just about everything they'll see from web to email, this is for you.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketing automation - drip campaigns, newsletters, dynamic content, lead scoring, everything you'd expect. It's taken some time to get everything up and running (we have a small team), but it's pretty exciting to see it start paying off. I cannot say we have truly benefited yet, but we see the potential and are starting to see the payoff.

What do you like best?

I love the simplicity of set up and UX. I have used many of these software platforms and let me tell you that you will not get better for functionality and ease of use. Do not let that fool you into thinking it is too basic. It is well designed and gives you a full overview of all marketing and sales metrics,

What do you dislike?

Honestly, there is not any. I would be lying if I said there was.

The only thing and this is if i was nitpicking would be an improvement to the mobile offering which i believe they are working on

Recommendations to others considering the product

Have it as your top two and compare it as I did. You will not find a better thought out and complete service with a model that works.

Functionality is brilliant!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I am an agency and therefore work with multiple clients which requires me to have a full overview of everything at the click of my fingers. Due to to set up and ease of use i can do that and be well informed quickly

4. A UI that is enables you to create complex landing pages and bespoke email marketing campaigns

5. The price is about right for pitching to SMB's

6. The support team is knowledgeable and quick to respond to queries

What do you dislike?

I'd like the lead capture screens to be more drag and drop oriented and to have some more design features added.

Although Sharpspring provides Zapier for integration, it would be great to have more native integrations to reduce reliance on that integration technology.

On the plus side, Sharpspring frequently adds new features which mean things general evolve quite rapidly.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Great marketing automation software for SMB's looking to track engagement and nurture leads into clients.

Effective for B2B or B2C style businesses.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I use Sharpspring as a marketing automation platform for Small Medium Businesses (SMB's) to help them improve their digital marketing ROI.

The platform easily integrates with pretty much any website type and allows me to demonstrate the effectiveness of my digital marketing campaigns to my clients as it tracks visitors and engagement (in terms of clicks and subscriptions) to landing pages and the email campaigns I create.

What do you like best?

The constant support from SharpSpring at the speed of their support team makes it really easy to reduce downtime if you are stuck on any part of the product!

The system really ties in the sales and marketing to work together and really help to define qualified leads for the sales team members. The email builder is so easy to use which reduces the stress and time it used to take to make previous email campaigns!

What do you dislike?

It does take a long time to work out the product and you have to be dedicated to make sure you retain all the information but your on boarding specialist really helps with this.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's great to tie in all your sales and marketing and make 2 teams of people into 1, It has improved our structure and given us time to think of new ideas and expand what we can do!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It has saved us a lot of time and now allows us to record and monitor our sales and marketing to really see what works and what doesn't. It also has allowed us to see the correlation between how many more website views we get when sending emails out - helping us to expand our knowledge of our database and what they want to see on our websites and the use of Visitor ID supports our tracking gives us live updates of our visitors to the sites.

What do you like best?

I love the personal customer care. They were with me and my team every step of the way. I also got what I wanted day one: one dashboard with accurate viewing of all our finance, sales and marketing efforts. Really connects the dots for us, and for our clients who also request this.

What do you dislike?

You have to be committed. It takes a solid 6 weeks to learn the tools, though time well invested. There's even ways to have dynamic content on your landing pages, track website visitors through the lead process, and persona-dynamic emails and webpages. So yeah- worth learning to stay current.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Definitely trial it. Also on their site, they have comparisons between their software and others. That was really helpful when I was trying to decide the pros and cons- and what's right for my company.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I needed a dashboard to see across the departments-- from finance to marketing to sales. What really works; what's a waste of time. SharpSpring does this- and more. It also makes deploying instances for our clients affordable too. So over time, this investment can pay for itself.

What do you like best?

Hands down they have the best onboarding process I've ever seen. Most companies sign you up and then give you some videos and access to support and toss you in. They have a scripted process they follow that includes unlimited access to an onboarding specialist for the first 60 days. But when I was onboarding clients quickly into the platform, he didn't hesitate to jump into the trenches with me and spend our sessions setting things up for those clients instead of following the script.

What do you dislike?

The landing page building kind of sucks, but I'm using Thrive Architect with WordPress for landing pages anyway, so I really didn't care.

Recommendations to others considering the product

My recommendation is to just talk to the team. Ask your questions, let them show you around the software, and get comfortable with them. The software is great and will do it's job, and the people behind it will show you how amazing they are.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We started as a HubSpot partner agency, but ran into the same problems that you'll see other reviewers throwing out there. The cost of the software is too pricey for most customers. The contracts are not appealing. And we basically had to cut our own profits to get them into the software.

SharpSpring is super affordable for even our smallest clients with their Mail+ Platform, and for clients with a little more budget we can use the full Automation Suite. There are no lengthy contracts. So we're able to easily just pop SharpSpring in as a line item on our contracts with the clients and we haven't had anyone turn it down yet.

What do you like best?

Can really get started quickly. From importing current contacts via CSV to sending those initial contacts an email, it's fast, simple and can bring some great results. Our agency began using SharpSpring in late 2016 after we compared other marketing automation platforms. The pricing structure was just what our growing digital agency needed...not to break our bank, but to allow us to mature and grow and provide awesome automation solutions to our client base.

I also like that the SharpSpring developers are continuously looking for ways to improve the platform. Adding new integrations, new partnerships with other vendors, improving UX, etc. It's all good stuff :)

What do you dislike?

Sometimes I think SharpSpring is the small fish in a pond of larger fish...but soon, they will fully mature.

Recommendations to others considering the product

You can't beat the startup costs and all the features that SharpSpring can provide you! I reviewed 5 other marketing automation platforms and after being basically "bullied" into signing a huge contract with one of the platforms I came across SharpSpring and their awesome interactive demo and down to earth sales team. That was the biggest reason I started with SharpSpring and continue to be impressed every week!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our agency doesn't have a sales team, we're just made up of a handful of partners currently, and we're able to nurture new clients and grow our leads into customers all by utilizing workflows and email campaigns. Couldn't grow without SharpSpring.

What do you like best?

The capacity to understand your clients interests, in order to make campaigns to focalized segments.

What do you dislike?

Nothing in particular. As a fact we are very happy with the use of SharpSpring in Sales and Marketing.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Best value for money.

Easy way to begin with CRM processes in organizations that has not been use it previously.

Support sales process with digital marketing automation in one software.

Unlimited users for the same fee.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

You can go to massive number of clients with personalized messages, and as a sales person complete your CRM journey through the sales process with easy ways to touch your client in many ways. Is amazing to notice who is interested in your comunication in order to proceed with your sales process.

What do you like best?

Our digital marketing team is now able to offer marketing tools previously only available to larger companies. SharpSpring offers small and mid-sized companies an incredible opportunity to exponentially expand their ROI. With partner-preferred pricing on licenses and other agency-exclusive benefits, we are able to deliver affordable access to software that streamlines and activates lead generation, contact handling, sales management, and analytics.

What do you dislike?

No dislikes so far. Our staff has offered feedback during the onboarding process and customer support is outstanding with highly trained and responsive staff. SharpSpring is just a few years old, but updates are clearly based on feedback. Software enhancements are practical, intuitive and frequent.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

SharpSpring easily pays for itself with the precision marketing data, automated management, and time efficiency the service brings to our clients. We can offer clients a fully integrated tool to merge sales and marketing outreach strategy and increase ROI.

What do you like best?

What I like best about SharpSpring is that they specialize in providing powerful professional tools to marketing agencies for a fraction of what other platforms like Infusionsoft and HubSpot charge.

I spent a good month looking at all the other companies in the automation space. I sat through multiple demos and heard all of the sales pitches. I settled on ShaprSpring for three main reasons.

1) They had good tools. Their workflows and campaign tools were every bit as good as what I saw with other platforms. I could finally have my landing page builder and my email automation in the same application along with an awesome CRM and sales manager.

2) They were so much less expensive! I'm not kidding you. My cost for SharpSpring is a fraction of what I would pay for the same services through HubSpot or one of the others.

3) They don't compete with me. Sure, companies can use SharpSpring directly, but they pay way more than agencies do. These people have a real desire to help marketing agencies succeed and they back it up by providing serious value. Infusionsoft wanted to charge me more than my house payment each month for services and then they were going to directly compete with me for my clients' business! SharpSpring plays for my team and I wouldn't trade them for anything.

What do you dislike?

Sometimes I need connectivity to a service or want a feature that is still in development, so I have to have some patience. But, honestly, that's a small price to pay for the dedication and hustle that these folks bring to my team. They are constantly working to improve the product and I'm continually impressed with their results.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are an agency, there is no better partner than SharpSpring. Make sure you ask anyone else you may be considering how they keep you clients from going around you and dealing with them directly. Also, pay close attention to the number of manageable contacts and customer accounts you get. SharpSpring give you 100,000 contacts and three client contacts without charging you extra. Most other don't even come close to that.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

With ShaprSpring, I am able to offer game-changing automation to my clients. I use the CRM to collect customer data from everything – recruiting ads, marketing ads, Facebook ads, landing pages, website pages, you name it. They've always had Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, but with SharpSpring, they now have names, faces, and profiles.

I have found ways to integrate chat applications, Facebook Messenger, text message applications, and more into SharpSpring. This give me the ability to, not only market to my client's customers, but to re-market to them as well using email campaigns.

The other really cool thing that I have been able to do with SharpSpring is export contacts from the CRM and load them into Facebook for audience building. Combining a bit of collected data about our local loyal customers with the power of a Facebook lookalike audience delivers ad targeting on an unprecedented level.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring is very easy to use even with its extensive range of features. The support is also excellent, I usually receive a response within an hour or so, and if what I want to do isn't possible you can submit a feature request for it to be added to their development roadmap.

What do you dislike?

SharpSpring is still lacking some features to make it a perfect fit for our business, and sometimes to do what we want you have to go a long way round but i'm sure this will improve over time.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

SharpSpring action groups (workflows) has allowed us to set up 'drip-feed' emails to our prospects which is constantly running in the background. We also benefit greatly from SharpSpring's reporting features which enable us to report on the success of emails, number of new opportunities, opportunity stages, sales person success etc most of which can be easily exported to CSV.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring has a huge amount of features and is really amazing value versus other solutions. They have hit a sweet spot with agencies like us of offering a solid platform with truly exceptional value. Not only are the monthly costs very affordable, but they also include free licenses for us to use with clients. When you consider the fact that competitors want us to charge clients in the region of £500 or more per month for marketing automation then this is a perfect way to get clients on board at very low risk. On top of this, the SharpSpring customer support is truly excellent with the team being quick to reply and eager to resolve any issues as soon as possible.

What do you dislike?

To be honest, there is very little to dislike. The platform is full of features and is always being improved. The UX could be improved in certain instances to be more intuitive but the team at SharpSpring welcome feature requests and feedback and always come back with good reasons why they are or are not going to develop your request.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Simply the best value marketing automation platform out there in terms of pricing and features. You will not find another company that comes close. This is especially important for small to medium -sized agencies where monthly license costs are key. The free licenses that SharpSpring gives you are also vital in ensuring that you can onboard clients with little or no friction.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

SharpSpring is very likely to be the most important investment we have ever made in terms of tools and software. As a B2B marketing agency, we were frustrated with our lack of ability to increase our value to clients beyond simply creating content. We lacked the ability to create landing pages or email campaigns, or the capability to give clients detailed insight into who was interacting with digital campaigns. SharpSpring totally changes all of that. It gives us a huge new capability to offer clients inbound marketing and lead scoring as well other really valuable tools such as the ability to create attractive landing pages, forms and email campaigns. Of course, we can also create drip-feed email campaigns based on customer behaviours. The level of prospect insight is also key for clients who want to understand more about who is interacting with them digitally. We had been looking at other marketing automation platforms for a year (especially Hubspot) but the huge price tag was a barrier to entry. SharpSpring has completely transformed our offering to make it vastly more compelling to prospects and existing clients. This is especially the case as they include free licenses for us to use with clients as we see fit. I'll even venture, that SharpSpring is such good value that I had to see what the catch was....and there is none (they even give you a one month notice period). SharpSpring is great and once we have demonstrated the capabilities of the platform then to many people it's a no-brainer. In time, I have no doubt that it will open up several other revenue streams.

What do you like best?

After reviewing several marketing platforms for ourselves as well as for our clients, we found SharpSpring to be the best of 'all' worlds. It's robust enough to compete with the larger enterprise programs and intuitive enough that it offers a smooth transition from a simple email marketing system.

What do you dislike?

I honestly haven't found anything that I dislike about the program. I've had questions during my ramp-up period and support has been surprisingly thorough and responsive, and the instructional media is good.

Recommendations to others considering the product

SharpSpring has a great agency model we can can offer to our clients. In fact, we switched not just ourselves, but two clients from the software we used previously.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

SharpSpring allows us to create robust sales pipelines and assign lead scoring so that our marketing teams can work more in tandem with the sales teams, handing them better-qualified leads. We also love the ability to track who is on our website and what their activity level is, as well as the ability to offer a customized experience based on customer behavior using their dynamic text feature.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring is very easy to use for someone who may not be super tech savvy-like me! I am the content writer and client manager so I do need to use SharpSpring to send emails and manage our leads. It's very easy to use.

What do you dislike?

There are a couple of design features that could use some updating, but SharpSpring is constantly updating their interface and they take our feedback and utilize it, so I'm never too worried. I'd like a 'back' option in the email function. Currently, you have to navigate back from the menu bar. It's not a deal breaker, it would just make things that much quicker and more productive.

Recommendations to others considering the product

SharpSpring is perfect for a small or medium agency, like us. We currently have 5 clients on SharpSpring and will be adding up to 3 more in the next 2 months. If I'm doing a lengthy automation, it can take up to 2 working days to write all of the content and load the emails in. We are a small team of 2, so with the amount we manage, SharpSpring is just perfect. I think you just have to see what's best for your client. We still have some clients only using free email services, such as Mail Chimp or Gmail because they don't have the need for automation yet. As they grow, we will upgrade them. A much larger database holding clients may find advantages to other platforms, but again SharpSpring is perfect for small to medium clients.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

SharpSpring allows us to track information for our clients that we would not be able to find elsewhere with this budget. Personally, I use SharpSpring to onboard new clients (with an automation) as well as track our leads. Whenever we sign a new client, I just send them an email with next steps for their onboarding process and it has saved me LOADS of time!

What do you like best?

As a marketing agency we work on a daily base with the Sharpspring Automation software and we use it for our own marketing as to drive leads for our clients. What I definitly like is that Sharpspring has a great support team friendly and always willing to help. The learning curve is quite steep in the beginning but when you get the hang of it is easy to use. The company keeps adding new features to the software. They also really listen to their users concerning feature requests and issue's. Overall I'm more than happy with Sharpspring Marketing Automation.

What do you dislike?

In my opinion the email builder is not what it can be but Sharpspring is still developing this feature and it keeps getting better.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's the most complete automation tools in this price range.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

One of the benefits we have realized is a big time saving by automating a lot of proceses.

What do you like best?

Sharpspring's constantly improving software provides every feature that my company and I needs. From email marketing automation to lead tracking- this system has everything configured to a science. The pricing is amazing and the customer support that you receive as a client is unmatched. Another aspect that highly impresses me is their ability to improve. Just when I feel that Sharpspring has peaked and cannot get any better.. they do just that! Learn the software and you'll love it.

What do you dislike?

I'm 100% satisfied with my past and continued experiences with Sharpspring.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Use the tutorials! They're great!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are able to monitor all of our reps activities seamlessly, where beforehand it took away countless hours just to ensure our reps were on track. Another tool that I love is the VisitorID function. We were able to teach our reps to track active visitors on our website to monitor how hot the leads were which resulted in higher conversions.

What do you like best?

We love SharpSpring because it's powerful, easy-to-use and priced right. I've used other marketing automation platforms in the past. I can say SharpSpring is just was good, if not better than all the others we used. The amount of contact records you can get for the price is just not comparable. For example, if you use Hubspot, you're looking at 1000 contact records for $800 a month. Most companies need way, way more than 1000 records. With SharpSpring, you get a comparable product with a minimum of 10,000 records for $650 a month. If you go through Partner Agency, you may even get more contact records for the same price.

Overall, the product does what they say it does; and they are continually adding new features and improving older ones.

What do you dislike?

Once and while, there are too many steps or clicks to do simple tasks. And, I don't like how you can't do a mass deletion of say, contact records.

Recommendations to others considering the product

SharpSpring is like any other marketing automation platform, in that, you must compete fully in order to your full return on investment.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use SharpSpring to build our clients marketing funnels, do email campaigns, manage social media, track campaigns and associated sales with ROI. We find clients who commit to SharpSpring love how it brings everything together, so we as well as them, can manage their marketing performance better, increase leads, conversions and sales. Finally, the ability to track everything allows us to prove our value.

What do you like best?

The robust features of SharpSpring have allowed my firm and my clients to consolidate software and therefore right out of the gate be able to affect the bottom line. Once fully implemented we've seen increases in revenue and efficiency for not only ourselves, but our clients.

What do you dislike?

Just like any robust platform there is a bit of a learning curve to take full advantage of the plethora of features SharpSpring provides.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Be sure you're prepared for the learning curve, and work backwards. Identify the kinds of information you want to be able to track, the campaigns you want to run, and then work backwards towards how you will track and implement those campaigns.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

One of the biggest problem SharpSpring has helped us solve is the ability to focus our sales efforts on individuals that are truly ready to purchase our services. With SharpSpring we can focus our efforts on prospects that have spent their time researching who we are and what we do. Furthermore SharpSpring has allowed us to view what our prospects are looking at (both emails we've sent them and pages they have viewed on our website). We have found this information invaluable when it comes to being prepared for that "first phone call" with a prospect.

What do you like best?

It was pretty easy to use and if you are using it as a CRM, I could see how it would be helpful for small businesses.

What do you dislike?

We were (WAY) oversold on the Salesforce sync. We were under the impression, from both SharpSpring and our 3rd party vendor, that SharpSpring would sync with Accounts and Campaigns. This is not the case; only Leads and Contacts sync at this time. Since a lot of our marketing is account-based, this would not work for us. It would have been helpful to know this during the beginning of the implementation phase instead of it taking 3 months to figure out. In addition, the email editor and landing page editor are very buggy. It is helpful to have a person on staff who knows HTML. We also had deliverability issues, but did not dig too deep into it since we found out the sync did not work properly.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Don't use if you plan to integrate with Salesforce.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Unfortunately, it did not work for us. If you plan to integrate with a different CRM, I highly recommend a different platform.

What do you like best?

We like the ease to use of SharpSpring with our clients and agency partners. First all, the competitive price. No none beat it. At second, all licenses are Full feature. Point. It's ease to implement, to manage and to generate reports. Not mention the support and on boarding team.

What do you dislike?

We're facing a lot of "mind set changing"in terms of understand the work flow mechanism, with its own logic, different from other platforms, where we use drag and drop features to create workflows. In SS we have to "map" it to create. But once created, it works so well.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Please, if you are in digital business, SharpSpring its a must use!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The Visitor ID feature allow us to know for sure all history of a lead, BEFORE they becomes a lead; What paths they cross along the journey and that way we can see if theres an alignment with the paths we've early created in our goals definition. And still on the route or adjust it .

What do you like best?

Sharpspring makes more advanced marketing tech available to all of our clients - even the smaller, more risk-averse businesses. I have also had a wonderful experience with everyone I've spoken to - responsive, helpful, and friendly.

What do you dislike?

It can be a little glitchy, but tech support is usually pretty good about solving it in a reasonable time frame. If you have many very tight deadlines, this might not be for you.

It's not platinum-level ease of use. However, it is far easier to use and a far more robust platform than you would expect for the price.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's really best to have someone on your team with decent, basic coding skills. You don't need to code, per say, but it makes customization and solving glitches a lot easier.

It's probably best for clients who have never used marketing automation before.

They're always coming out with new features (landing pages, personas, etc.), so you might have to be a little more patient than with competing software, but it'll be there eventually.

They have some support docs and webinars, but you're not going to get as many big, detailed tutorials that you might get with competitors, so you may need to do some self-teaching. There's not as much hand holding (but you're also not paying to have your hand held).

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our clients especially love that they can tell who is on the website.

We're able to offer any benefit of marketing automation to our clients at the pace that they are ready to adopt it.

What do you like best?

In my many years of ad agency business development I've used almost every marketing automation tool, Salesforce, Hubspot, Marketo, Excel, you name it. When I discovered SharpSpring I knew this product had been designed for me. It has everything I need, and nothing I don't. The workflows match my behavior and the tools are smart and intuitive. It is easy to set up, simple to use and all my clients love it.

What do you dislike?

I didn't discover SharpSpring soon enough. What I wouldn't do to get back all the wasted time I spent trying to get the other top name systems to do what I wanted.

Recommendations to others considering the product

SharpSpring combines all of the things I want without complicating my processes with the stuff I don’t need. And it connects and complements the right activities together in one platform that seamlessly fits into my business development approach. SharpSpring, like any of the popular systems, isn’t a replacement for smart business development. It’s a tool to make you smarter and more successful. It represents the best of Salesforce, Hubspot, Leadlander, Campaign Monitor, Google analytics, Social platofrms, Post-it Notes and everything else, with a simple, easy to use interface that I call marketing magic. For less than a car payment it has cleaned up my desk, made me better organized and put me in the driver’s seat of new business.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I use SharpSpring as the core engine of in and outbound prospecting. It saves me time while allowing me to reach, engage and convert bigger audiences than I thought possible. It shows me in simple, easy to read analytics what is working and what isn't and makes it easy to share my results with clients and colleagues. It is a complete system so I can see all the activities and attribute results across all my content.

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

For now nothing displeases me, I came from another tool and I'm really enjoying it.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Highly recommend, it has been very helpful and the cost benefit is excellent.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have been using the Sharpspring tool for a year and a half, and we have nothing to complain about to date. SharpSpring has very useful and interesting functions, and it has really helped our process with clients. Since we’ve partnered with SharpSpring, new functions have been launched, adding even higher value. We found it very professional that the release of these new functions came with no additional cost. All of our customers praise our choice of partnering with SharpSpring. Because of the amazing client feedback, we plan to keep this partnership for a long time.

What do you like best?

I love the look and organization of the platform. Almost everything is easy to find and easy to figure out, even if you don't know exactly where to look at first. The SpringBoard Help tab and the Get Support function are both very useful for finding answers to questions.

What do you dislike?

I don't like that some of the sections (like Scheduled Events) don't have a search function. This would be really useful and we actually just submitted a feature request for it and I believe they are working on it! I also don't like that you can't work in multiple instances at once. Maybe this is a functionality flaw that can't be overcome, but if it could that would be really cool!

Recommendations to others considering the product

SharpSpring is very user-friendly, but at the same time has many useful functions. It is relatively inexpensive and the quality of support is exceptional! You can easily jump on the phone with SharpSpring support and get your questions answered and your problems troubleshooted right away.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

As a financial marketing firm, with so many products and emails to handle, SharpSpring makes it very easy for us to automate when emails are being sent out. I think it saves a lot of time and simplifies the process for us. Scheduling emails and workflows in SharpSpring is super easy, especially once you've been doing it for a while. I think a lot of businesses who utilize email marketing would benefit from this platform. Also, any businesses who are interested in lead generation, lead nurturing, or lead and campaign management.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring has responsive support and carries the number one quality I look for in a software: Innovation. I know this platform won't become stale or outdated. Their email creation and landing pages are on par with Hubspot, and outperform others I have used. I only anticipate they will improve, as I see new features come out regularly.

What do you dislike?

The automation tasks and workflows can take a bit of time to figure out. There is not a visual way to view workflows, which can be challenging when designing a campaign. The software can be buggy, although a refresh usually fixes this. Their help center could be better documented and searchable, but I typically turn to support when I can't find what I need.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are evaluating Hubspot, look at SharpSpring.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are moving more toward automation in our email outreach, and designing repeatable templates for landing pages. The faster I can turn out campaigns, which SharpSpring helps with, the more time I can spend analyzing customer behavior and where our funnel can improve.

What do you like best?

When you are searching for a serious and honest partner in Marketing Automation. Sharpspring would be it.

This highly dynamic team of experts are creating a wonderful peace of software, always upgrading it for the best of the customer. With this kind of features at an affordable price, ROI is guaranteed... You just have to find a good service solution partner.

What do you dislike?

It would be nice if it could post social media ads based on customer behavior... but probably they are already working on it ;-)

Recommendations to others considering the product

Imagine a future where more customers will find your company, just by doing an automatic process that always learns and learns... one day the distance between you and the competition will be large enough to assure continuity of your services... It also creates a permanent value in your business. Not only assets and people but knowledge and data....

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

B2B solutions in marketing en sales... and of course services as content marketing.

What do you like best?

Many of our clients are small organisations and they want to use the system themselves - as a result, the fact that it is easy to use and designed in a common sense way, new users can quickly start to get results and don't feel overwhelmed by the system. That said the feature set is extensive and powerful and being added to on a regular basis. Support is good and SS are responsive. Pricing is very competitive.

What do you dislike?

Occasional bugs and performance issues but these are sorted quickly. Lack of awareness of new features of system tweaks can throw you when not expected (this is largely resolved now as they have a good 'up-coming features / changes' communication). Could do more with social media & SEO functions

Recommendations to others considering the product

Not as feature rich as some higher end (and very expensive!) products but really, really good balance of price, features, ease of use and support.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Tracking prospects effectively, campaign attribution is now easy, lead capture and nurturing is the main benefit that MA systems bring and SharspSpring makes this straightforward but offers flexibility due to its rich feature set.

What do you like best?

2. Along with unlimited 24/7 support, in my opinion, these are the two most important features out with cost of course which set SharpSpring apart as the right platform for our boutique digital marketing agency.

3. New integration with Litmus test.

4. Link up with Zapier integration to allow connection to hundreds of 3rd party software providers with the Zapier integration and SharpSpring APIs.

What do you dislike?

1. Monthly fees in dollars do not convert to local UK sterling currency rates, unlike other US marketing software providers. You pay in £ sterling the same monthly fee as in US $ dollars.

2. Email builder while it is satisfactory it could be even more user friendly.

Recommendations to others considering the product

From experience marketing automation requires a lot of investment in;

1. Researching the right platform to meet your business and strategic agency objectives whilst ensuring it will be a good fit for your target market audience who you wish to use the platform.

2. Setting time aside to properly understand the platform and its capabilities.

3. Nothing will beat real world experience via using the software in a live situation to properly get to grips with all the features within the marketing automation platform.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Ensuring clients have the additional ability to move their marketing strategy from simple email campaigns where it is difficult to capture those all important leads through to solving this important issue via complete integration with our new SharpSpring Marketing Software and all the benefits that it offers such as;

1. Nurturing leads that are not quite ready to buy all the way through the sales funnel process till they are ready to purchase.

2. Offering a systematic process to assist in client retention, repeat business and referrals.

What do you like best?

- Lately they introduced a social listening dashboard which is really nice to follow FB pages and repost messages.

- Gives you insights about the people and companies visiting your website.

What do you dislike?

It's quite difficult to start with. It takes a lot of time to find out how the tool works and program it to make it useful for your website/company.

Recommendations to others considering the product

When you are implementing the tool, get someone to work on this fulltime. Once you get interrupted with other work it's sometimes hard to get back to it. It takes full focus to know how the features work. After implementing it doesn't take a lot of time to use the tool.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

You can automize e-mail and it is easier to see when people might be interested in a service or product. We optimized our emails by interest based on the pages they are reading on our website and the whitepapers they download.

What do you like best?

We are a small marketing agency based in Lancaster, PA. What I like best is that I can offer my clients a CRM/Marketing Automation platform that is both affordable and very powerful. I love the flexibility in tailoring Sharp Spring to any client no mater what they niche market.

I love the fact that our clients have marketing happening to their leads even while they sleep or are to busy to follow up with leads.

I love the tracking features where I can send an email to a lead and when the lead clicks on the email, we can begin tracking their activities. Recently, a had an email in my inbox that said a particular lead had visited my website. Right away I figured I was about to receive a phone call from that person. Sure enough, seconds later, my phone rang. It was great to tell him that I was expecting his call!

There is much more that we hope to implement for our clients over the next year and I am excited about taking it much further.

What do you dislike?

It seem Sharp Spring could use some help in the transition from lead to Opportunities. Sometimes it seems a bit clumsy on that end.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are looking for a Lead Management, Email Marketing solution that is reasonable prices but also very powerful, we would highly recommend SharpSpring.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

In our company E-Impact Marketing LLC https://e-impactmarketing.com/ we are able to manage a host of leads who are interested in our marketing services (By the way, there is a free account for the agency included in the original plan). I can set reminders, log phone call notes, see which leads and most actively engaged and interested in our services and send email to leads on an automated basis.

We have also realized benefits in offering this reasonably prices service to nearly all of our clients. It gives them a basis for organizing leads and keeping up with managing all of that. Sharp Spring helps with our retainer basis approach to marketing.

What do you like best?

It's a complete marketing automation tool and not just an email marketing tool. They give you landing pages, workflows, emails, forms, CRM, etc. at a decent price point. So, it's a good first investment to test the marketing automation waters.

They have a monthly pricing option so that prevents vendor lock-in and reduces risk. Also, these folks roll out whatever they are lacking in pretty quickly. The support team is also very helpful.

What do you dislike?

The tool is buggy. And it's not like it refuses to work or something but there are small things which sometimes matter a lot. For example, being able to replace email variables with their values 100% of the times. The landing pages are not 100% customizable in terms of design and CSS. You have to find a workaround and sometimes there's not any workaround available so you have to run with whatever you have.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's a good first investment to get started with full-fledged marketing automation and evaluate its potential for your business. But, if you are already convinced with the impact of marketing automation for your business and price is not an issue then Hubspot should be your choice.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We were looking to get started with marketing automation and, Sharpspring looked like the most decent investment at the time. It helped us explore marketing automation for our business at the least cost possible.

What do you like best?

I love the ability to quickly build targeted lists, track the life of the relationship, and save a ton of time in the process.

Over the last twelve months Sharp Spring has helped double our client base while reducing the amount of time performing the mundane tasks associated with lead generation.

Now I know exactly who is engaging with me, where the lead originated and can easily automate the follow up and nurturing process.

What do you dislike?

Sharp Spring is a powerful marketing automation tool, but one hiccup is the Landing pages. I have had entire pages disappear and have had to make sure to save a copy of the HTML upon completion,

Recommendations to others considering the product

SharpSpring is definitely the best bang for your buck. Prior to using SharpSpring we looked at Hubspot, Sales Force Infusionsoft, and found SharpSpring to be the best value available.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Local lead generation is our primary function and SharpSpring has helped us shortcut the process using marketing automation. I love having the ability to quickly build targeted lists, know who is engaging with me, what steps the prospect is taking, and being able to easily automate most of the sales process.

What do you like best?

Ease of use and simplicity hands down. As a former HubSpot client, the SharpSpring cost is also a welcome surprise given the functionality included. It's very intuitive to use and this allows us to train clients faster and more efficiently and provide less support and troubleshooting for them on the backend. Of course this lowers our overall cost of doing business. For us at CX3 Group, all the functionality that we formerly used with HubSpot is included, whilst none of the bloat that didn't add value to us or our clients is there. This allows SharpSpring to offer a price point much much lower than HubSpot or it's competitors. In addition, and important for any growing company, SharpSpring has continued to roll out new relevant features over our two year tenure, BUT, they have not raised the pricing a single dollar. In fact, they've changed pricing so that it is incrementally less expensive for agencies to add clients on the platform.

What do you dislike?

Support has had growing pains which is to be expected given the growth of the company. Having said that they are now very responsive and available.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Try the demo which is guided by one of their talented salespeople. It's very impressive and convinced us that we were overpaying for marketing automation by ten times.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

SharpSpring solved the cost/benefit problems we had when trying to sell inbound marketing services as a HubSpot client. The benefits have been increased business due to more retainer based clients over the past two years we've used SharpSpring.

What do you like best?

As the account manager for the agency, I use SharpSpring on an hourly bases. I find the VisitorID feature the most helpful since it allows me to track, qualify, and connect with leads based on which pages they visit on our website.

Another helpful feature is the crm feature. This allows our team to know who reached out to the prospect, what was said, and how the conversation went.

What do you dislike?

Not much to complain about. I guess just the typical bugs that come with the beta stage of the new features.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Download it, go through the tutorials, and poke around the various features. Play with the features and learn by trial and error. Have fun and never be afraid to reach out to SharpSpring for help.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What SharpSpring helped us solve the most for our agency was filtering leads into their respected funnel(marketing, video, web, branding). What SharpSpring helped us solve is to create forms that connect to drip campaigns which helps us nurture leads more effectively.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring tries very hard to cater to agencies, and their pricing model really does reflect that. It is an affordable marketing tool for nearly every business and we've been able to sign almost all of our clients onto to the platform. Also, the beginning weeks of training were nice overall, though if you have a small staff, like us, it is hard to find the time to get past the basic level information and into the deeper functionality of the platform.

What do you dislike?

Honestly, the platform has not been very user friendly for us. HubSpot was a headache at first, especially when it came to designing emails, but our team quickly got a hang of it...with SharpSpring, we are constantly having issues with their email and landing page designer that we never are able to solve. We also had an incident this week where a large amount of contacts were deleted (it was an error on our part), but we were shocked to know that they could not be restored at all. We had a similar issue in HubSpot, but they were able to restore our account within a few days. Overall, you get what you pay for, so you just have to balance out ease of use with what you're willing to pay.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Give it a try if you can't afford another program, and try to do as many training sessions in your first few weeks as possible! Really get to know the software before implementing too many clients.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use SharpSpring as the main email marketing platform for all of our clients. We are slowly getting into all of the Sales and campaign functions.

Response from Koertni Adams of SharpSpring

We really appreciate your feedback. I'd love the opportunity to chat with you about what’s working and what’s not. We can troubleshoot together – we're here to help :) If you’re up for it, please contact me at koertni.adams@sharpspring.com to continue the conversation.

What do you like best?

The platform has a simple layout and is easy to navigate. Things are where they say they are.

What do you dislike?

If you're a newbie, this might be complicated for you. However, the group offers excellent support. Plus, there are a lot of tutorials. It's worth the time to learn because the tools are powerful and are worth it.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's worth looking at ShaprSpring for several reasons:

1) They built a very promising platform, and they are always open to feedback. Really. They listen. They collaborate. What other group is doing that?

2) Customer service is ready to help, and they bend over backwards to do so. They are polite, and the really do want things work out. In short: They care.

3) The system could be difficult for a newbie, but they have tons of tutorials, and they WILL get together with you via GoToMeeting, phone, whatever it takes to get the job done.

4) This platform is moving forward and keeping ahead of the curve. They're keeping up to date on business needs and trends, and they know the difference.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

There are a few key features that I believe set Sharpspring apart from similar automation platforms in this price range -

1. Ability to share content across client instances -

As a small agency, maximizing our resources and bandwidth is crucial. Content creation can be a real time sink, so having the ability to use templates, emails, etc across instances saves a ton of time in both creation and organization.

2. Life of Lead - (& Email syncing)

I am not aware of another platform that offers something like this or in the way that Sharpspring does it. I have used about a dozen different platforms from SMB to enterprise level (think Eloqua, Hubspot, Marketo) and this feature is only available in Sharpspring to my knowledge. This is the feature that tends to get the most 'ooohs and aaahs' when we demo it to a client. I would include the ability to sync your email Mailbox with Sharpspring as part of this feature.

3. Full functional CRM - I know that a lot of platforms do this or can integrate with a 3rd party CRM, but having it all in a single platform is a plus for us because most of our clients are SMB and do not have the budget for something like Salesforce or to program an API. In my opinion it makes no sense to have a MAP and not have either a built-in CRM or an integration with one.

What do you dislike?

1. Communication regarding updates - It sometimes seems like new dev items get migrated into production without notification (or at least without proactive notification. By "proactive" I mean in a way where I do not have to search it out in the partner portal). As an Eloqua user I am accustom to very thorough and precise communication re: dev items both on the roadmap and soon to be migrated.

2. Antiquated Workflow Editor - I just recently learned that Sharpspring will be rolling out a new Workflow Editor that intends to be more of a GUI-click and drag editor. Until that happens, the current workflow editor can be confusing when creating flows with lots of steps. Sharpspring's current editor is essentially the same as Hubspot's in that regard, but a world away from something like Eloqua or even Autopilot. I am looking forward to the new one.

3. Importing/Updating/Exporting Data - My biggest gripe in this area is on the export side. Every time I want to export data I have to export the entire contact record with all of the fields. sometimes this is OK, and other times it can be a real pain when there are a lot of custom fields. I rarely ever need the entire record,

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I think I pretty much covered this in the "Likes" section. Resource/Bandwidth allocation is one of our biggest concerns, and we are solving some of that by having the ability to have one marketing automation "hub" for all of our Sharpspring clients. We do have clients that use other platforms, and it definitely makes it easier when I can stay within a single platform and work on multiple client projects at the same time.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring has helped us establish longer retainers and made it possible for us to build stronger, valuable relationships with our clients. After one year of weaving SharpSpring into our business, we have seen huge growth for ourselves and for our clients as well. We love how SharpSpring positively positions our agency as the resource, it is very easy to get new licenses for clients, and their new billing structure makes it more affordable for smaller agencies like us to carry the costs. Also, we no longer need to have a separate landing page builder and email builder since SharpSpring does this all. We save a ton of time not having to do it this way anymore!

What do you dislike?

Parts of the platform lack features such as the email builder. I'm not crazy how their emails look on mobile. The app is almost useless for design and marketing purposes but it's great for entering contacts. As with any other new technology, it hasn’t been without a few struggles. Still, it beats having to jump from one platform to another to duct tape together all of our marketing efforts.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you give SharpSpring a chance make sure you spend the first two months making it an integral part of your business before you market it as a service. You have to also get your clients to buy into the platform as well. If not, they will be spending a lot of money on something they don't see the value in. It's up to you to continue to prove its value! Be patient and consistent with it. Spend the time to get certified and encourage your team to get really comfortable using it.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It helps us determine the best way to follow up with leads based on our bird's eye view of which pages they viewed on our site. I love that they send emails everyday that list your website visitors along with their lead score. Now when we follow up with a call or email we can tailor our message based on their visitor patterns! It takes the guess work out of following up with the right message. If visitors go to your branding page, then you can select to put them into an automation workflow that is specific to branding. It really has helped us be more effective with our time and our follow ups.

What do you like best?

We've been using Sharpspring for a couple of years now after two previous years of frustrating research with other providers of marketing automation software. The knock on marketing automation is that it is expensive and complicated. The only clients that we talked to that could afford the top five providers had a minimum of a billion dollars in sales and they had already invested in one of the top five. We made some good money helping them understand how to use the tools but they had nothing good to say about the customer experience. This was before we found Sharpspring.

We still will recommend Sharpspring along with the top five without explaining the downsides of the competitors but they obviously see the difference once we walk them through the pros and cons, usually ending with "Why is Sharpspring so much cheaper?" The answer is that Sharpspring isn't greedy. I've actually had a top-five sales rep tell me that if a company isn't ready to spend $10K per month on their product then they don't want to talk to the client. Most of our clients spend a total of $10K per month on their entire marketing budget.

What do you dislike?

While Sharpspring customer service is great, it is time limited because of the location of their agents. A company on the West Coast has to get up really early in the morning, or schedule a time during lunch.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you have limited budget, limited marketing staff and limited experience in marketing automation tools, there is no other choice than Sharpspring.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We also use Sharpspring to introduce clients to the concept of marketing automation. We set up a tracking code on their website for a few weeks just to show them the kind of data that comes back. That helps them understand the value of the technology. Sharpspring has become our foot in the door to new clients. Once they see what the tools can do, then we can show how we add value in the creation of engaging content. The first client we signed up for the service was able to see an immediate improvement in their outreach in two months with a 1000 percent increase in traffic just from changing the text on their site. Sharpspring has helped us demostrate our ROI.

What do you like best?

It has everything I need to implement comunication estrategy and prove ROI for my campaigns of my own companie and my customer's companies.

What do you dislike?

There is nothing to complain about at all.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I've been using Sharpspring in the last two years at least and it is just amazing. It has everything I need to implement comunication estrategy and prove ROI for my campaigns of my own companie and my customer's companies.

With SharpSpring I can track my paid campaigns and recognize what is giving results or not, I can creat beautifull landing pages without have any webdesigner skills, I can send automated comunication according to lead segmentation and their stages in the sales funnel and I can also manage all the relationship with my clients. There is nothing to complain about at all.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

With SharpSpring I can track my paid campaigns and recognize what is giving results or not, I can creat beautifull landing pages without have any webdesigner skills, I can send automated comunication according to lead segmentation and their stages in the sales funnel and I can also manage all the relationship with my clients.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring offers all of the core features needed to execute a solid marketing automation & lead nurturing strategy—but it costs far less than HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo and other major marketing automation tools.

I've found the platform to be overall very user friendly, and the SharpSpring team is great about releasing new features with lots of documentation. Recently SharpSpring added a "personas" feature that delivers much of the functionality that had made Pardot unique.

The VisitorID tool has been a godsend for our sales team: there's nothing like being able to show our sales team which companies visited our websites as a result of our content marketing efforts.

What do you dislike?

There's one email feature in particular: the ability to link in a built-in web-only email is currently missing from SharpSpring. I know from speaking with the SharpSpring team that this is in development—so hopefully this won't be a concern for too long.

SharpSpring's landing page tool has a different feel than what you'll find in other marketing automation systems or E.S.P.—it's a bit more like WishPond or UnBounce. This isn't a bad thing, but it can add to your learning curve if you're coming in from a different marketing automation tool.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our agency uses SharpSpring for its own marketing automation, behavior tracking, email marketing and CRM functions, and we've been extending its use out to our clients.

So far, we've been able to garner the same benefits from using other tools like HubSpot, Pardot, etc. without incurring a massive monthly expense.

What do you like best?

- They offer you way more contacts and features for your dollar, compared to the bigger guys.

- Lots of features being added monthly (although you will probably not use ALL of them, it's good to know they are available in case you expand your efforts)

- Easy-to-use UI

- The amount of stuff you can track and record about your website visitors! Really helpful for segmentation and lead scoring!

- Adwords integration is incredible - you can see the ROI from each ad group and keyword. This helps you see which ads not only deliver the most conversions, but which of those conversions actually turn into sales! (And how big those sales are). This is a MUST for optimizing ad campaigns that lead to offline selling

What do you dislike?

- Sometimes they will release features without fully testing them, which is kind of controversial. Some people love having access to cutting edge features at the sacrifice of them being buggy, some people hate that. Just be sure to fully test any new feature on your own before you recommend it to a client or to your boss.

- Setup can be cumbersome - A few basic things require technical expertise to set up, which can be a drawback for some. To get around this, consider working with one of their "partner agencies". These agencies license SharpSpring bundled with support and value-added services, often included in the same monthly price offered by SharpSpring. (tip: search for "sharpspring discount" to see what's out there)

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

- Cut down salesperson's time doing repetitive tasks like lead nurturing

- Gained better insight into performance of campaigns

- Were able to scale marketing efforts to levels not possible without software like this

What do you like best?

Sharpspring is CMS-agnostic so we didn't have to ditch the CMS we've used for years. With other marketing automation systems we had looked at, we wouldn't have had access to all of the features unless we used their proprietary CMS. AND they didn't have the ability to export all of the content to migrate to another CMS. That means if we had ever wanted to cancel we would have been stuck having to recreate our site. We're website developers so that isn't as big of a deal to us as to some others, but we certainly don't want to create extra work for ourselves because of a provider's restrictions.

What do you dislike?

Nothing! Literally, we've been very satisfied not only with the system but with the customer service we receive. If I had to say anything at all, it would be that I don't have time to play with the system as much as I would like to. The cobbler's kids have no shoes ;)

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you want to work with a company you can trust, I highly recommend Sharpspring. When we were looking at other marketing automation providers we felt like some were almost predatory. The feeling with Sharpspring is 180 degrees from that.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

1. We're segmenting our clients to better communicate with them, which has helped us upsell or cross sell clients that we've had for years who may not have used some of our other services before.

2. We're developing traffic funnels to help nurture prospects and move them towards conversion. It's helping us to prequalify prospects and waste less time with tire kickers.

3. We're creating landing pages for specific campaigns, which helps to fine tune the sales message and make conversion more likely.

What do you like best?

The automation, it's easy to setup and get funnels set right.

What do you dislike?

At times it can be frustrating to get the forms setup correctly.

Recommendations to others considering the product

You need some advanced knowledge of implementing various forms and coding. that would help you out a lot. Just a basic or no knowledge of this is going to leave you with a lot of questions and in need of a lot of support time. Which they have great support, but it would better if someone with more experience was using this product for your company.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Getting proper lead information from our forms. This has helped us get this information to better qualify our leads.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring combines all of the fundamentals of a great marketing automation, CRM, and ESP into one platform. I love the simplicity of building list segments, easily creating automated workflows, and the life of the lead functionality within the contact manager. Also we've been able to do some wonderful things for our clients using their open API.

What do you dislike?

I've experienced some difficulties with email sending reliability and a few other basic features. I think that SharpSpring is so focused on scaling, that they pass over perfecting a lot of their core functionality.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our clients are utilizing SharpSpring as a bridge between their marketing and sales. We are able to track marketing spend on a individual lead basis, from conception to completion, which helps us identify ROI. Our clients love the insight that they have on individual leads. They are able to understand the customer journey more clearly and better refine their marketing initiatives.

What do you like best?

I like a lot of SharpSpring. It's really easy to use and their service is awesome! When you are a new client, you get a really good and comprehensive training. Besides that, they have a support team ready, a site with hundreds of helpful articles and every Friday they organise a Springboard Live (a live training webinar).

What do you dislike?

Some features are only available in English. That's not that bad, but our clients are Dutch, so it's strange that some questions are in Dutch and some in English. It's not possible to add multiple mail addresses (business and private) to a contact. So you have to choose: two contacts for one lead or leave one address out of your system.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Really easy to use, a very good on boarding (training) and a high service level. The Sprinboard Live sessions (webinars) are helpful to understand what you can do with SharpSpring.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We now know who's visiting our website. We can identify them, see what they're looking for and optimize the content they see. We know a lot more about our visitors and clients before we even meet them. We don't need to think about our planning, because we're now able to plan in advance.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring opens the gates of customer data management and marketing automation to the masses. We are able to offer so much more value to our clients by vastly expanding our in-bound marketing capabilities and services – email campaigns, landing pages, CRM, sales management, etc. This multi-platform tool gives our clients the ability to fully integrate sales and marketing into one seamless management tool, increase productivity, marketing relevance, and sales revenues.

No long-term contract, monthly billing, and open structure make SharpSpring an easy startup and cost-effective choice compared to other services. We can now offer clients monthly subscription services that deliver greater-than-ever depth of measurable customer data and real-time relevant sales/marketing strategy based on the data.

What do you dislike?

Honestly, couldn’t be happier with the service. SharpSpring is relatively new (est. 2014), so expect frequent updates. We’ve also offered feedback during customer service calls and onboarding. Software enhancements we’ve seen thus far are practical, intuitive creating the best possible customer experience. When problems come up, highly skilled customer support is available to help us sort things out in a short amount of time.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are able to offer clients a custom-built digital marketing technology stack and highly effective subscription services to manage data and customer strategy. Our agency is able to offer these services at an incredible value, compared to other services. Our productivity, agency revenues, and client revenues are increased greatly as a result of incorporating SharpSpring into our digital marketing culture.

What do you like best?

The interface is really clean and professional, this is also enhanced by the white-labelling feature. The tool itself has all the necessary features to complete a good marketing automation system at a very reasonable price, which makes it incredibly attractive in what is becoming a very competitive market.

What do you dislike?

The system can be buggy at times, particularly around the Landing Page builder but with this being a recent addition it can be taken lightly for the time being. In itself, there is nothing I dislike about SharpSpring, but it can be frustrating when it does not work properly such as, emails / pages not rendering properly for mobile device or different mailbox systems and 'life of the lead' not recording accurately all the time. There are niggles with the system and this can be uncomfortable when you are selling this product to clients as no slack will be given, but SharpSpring are aware of these minor issues and are constantly striving for improvement and this outweighs any concerns I have in the short-term because I know it will only be temporary.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Don't skip on-boarding!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Improving SME's digital footprint by making them more dynamic and professional online, whether it is the website, advertising, social media, landing pages, and email etc, all of these cornerstones can be leveraged within SharpSpring by rounding off an overall view and filling in this missing pieces. A lot of clients would not bother looking at a tool like this if it wasn't for the keen pricing structure.

What do you like best?

I feel that SharpSpring has a lead over competitors when it comes to the marketing automation tied in with what they offer on the multiple sales pipleline tracking. They also have added the ability to send with your GSuite credentials for better deliverability, which is great.

What do you dislike?

Their UI is not always as friendly as say Hubspots. For example if you get a list of contacts, order them by lead score, and you click on a contact. When you click back, it's forgotten your search criterion.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

We have been on the Sharpspring platform for nearly a year now and it has changed our agency. Back in the day (you know, a "whole" 8 years ago), inbound marketing and the software that supported its methodology was not a very crowded sandbox. But now there are all kinds of full blown platforms and other software stacks - needless to say, the playground is getting full. What made Sharpspring appealing to us what how it allowed us to "handle the transaction". Our clients know we use Sharpspring but they continually refer to it as if it were "our platform" - this instantly changes the way they (and prospects) see us.

What do you dislike?

That being said, it has not been without its bumps and bruises. There have been times when features just didn't seem to work or required some guesswork (i.e. - building dynamic lists based on lead info seems to be hit or miss and the email builder is a bit clunky). In all fairness, we have just been too busy to become fluent in all aspects of the platform so this gripe may totally be on us, and not Sharpspring.

All in all, I don't see us moving in another direction any time soon. We are a growing agency and we have hitched our growth to that of the Sharpspring platform.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are a growing agency or business you owe it to yourself to at least give Sharpspring an opportunity. The way it is priced and is ease of implementation will give you and your clients early wins, especially if there hasn't been a platform like this in place yet in your agency or business.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Sharpspring is a true hub for our business. There isn't a day we aren't in it for our own company and for our clients. From our sales pipeline to lead nurturing, to client interactions, Sharpspring is something we have wrapped a lot of our process in. Each person involved in our company regardless level or position used Sharpspring in some way. At each point in our sales process is gives us a place to see if our own marketing efforts are working, which leads need attention, and what content is being effective - all of these things we do for our clients as well.

What do you like best?

Sharpspring takes what is usually highly expensive for small to midsize businesses (yet very needed), and make it affordable. I love their mission of democratizing inbound marketing. Their team is also very supportive and helpful, they are constantly working on improvements to the system and new features based on their customer feedback. As a digital marketing agency, Sharpspring has been a very helpful partner to have. Their love for agencies and understanding of general agency business operations helps them consistently provide value. We've been able to leverage Sharpspring to get our clients some very wonderful (and highly trackable!) results.

What do you dislike?

Sharpspring can glitch from time to time, however, each time this happens their support has been there and has worked diligently to help us resolve the problem.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Go for it! I believe that Sharpspring is a wonderful system and solution to all firms that respect trackable digital marketing. While there is a learning curve, the benefits make it completely worth it.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

For our clients, we are providing behavioral based automation and Sharpspring helps make this easy and possible at an affordable rate to both our agency and our clients. Sharpspring is also a great way to track general site analytics as well as lead score. We've also worked with several of our clients to teach the Sharpspring CRM - our clients very quickly become addicted to it. They love the ease of use and flexibility / customization options that Sharpspring provides in their CRM. The sales reporting features are another aspect of Sharpspring that our clients have really loved. We also are able to utilize Sharpspring for a variety of business industries, our clients have transactions that range from the $100s to + $1M and Sharpspring has been an awesome and scalable solution for each - it's generally great. It's a money saver compared to competitor price tags as well.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring has a great feature set that covers a lot of ground for me and my clients. It is straightforward to use and if I've ever had any issues their support team has always been proactive in assisting no matter what the reason.

What do you dislike?

The landing page feature isn't as evolved as I would like it to be. It does work, is included along with all other features and can achieve results however compared to other solutions on the market it just isn't as developed and robust. I'm sure with time this will change as they develop it further.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Find yourself a reliable partner who can help you with implementation and maximising your use.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I am primarily using it to lead management and nurturing purposes. Capturing leads and automating communications has helped me do the work of multiple people so it has saved me effort and time.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring has an incredible range of built-in features... and they are constantly evolving. Since we first started working with their platform (for clients), we've seen the addition of Personas (love this!), landing pages (could use some improvement), visual workflow (finally!) and other smaller but powerful components.

The platform also comes with a decent (very basic but customization ready) CRM and sales pipeline. These are powerful tools for small B2B businesses who are not wanting to break out their sales automation and customer management from their marketing automation.

SharpSpring is also building out more dynamic integration options which obviously makes them a stronger choice than many platforms who limit your connectivity to API or Zapier.

What do you dislike?

Customer support isn't always responsive nor thorough. You need to be very persistent.

The landing page builder is restrictive. We find for some clients its best to go with Unbounce and connect the platforms, while other simpler clients enjoy the built in landing page features.

The email templates are almost nil... again you need to populate the platform with your own designs.

The reporting is decent but for some of our clients not nearly robust enough. (We are looking for a way to integrate a reporting software - if anyone has suggestions please let me know!).

Recommendations to others considering the product

There are a lot of amazing, cost effective platforms for start-ups, small to mid sized businesses. Make a list of the goals you have for your platform and then compare the feature sets with what you require.

As well, be sure to do a trial run to ensure the platform will be as easy to use as you expect (keeping in mind there is always a learning curve).

Finally, implement with a plan. This may be an easy system to get used to... but if it's not set-up correctly it may feel like your climbing a mountain before you feel that it is bringing in results.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

The interface is easy to use and visually appealing. It doesn't take very long to get a handle on how to use the software and there are lots of support and training documents available in their partner portal. The pricing model is great for agencies.

What do you dislike?

They changed the way customer support operates several months ago. Previously you had an account rep who you could contact, now you just have to contact the general customer support which is terrible. They rarely solve you problems and often times you have to contact them several times in order to get a response from them. I have even contacted the head of agency support, who never responded back to me, so shows you were they are as far as support goes. Email deliverability is also an issue, after a year, they still have no answers as to why so many emails don't get delivered. I hope they clean up customer support and fix the many bugs in the software as it is a great service at a great price. Reporting and analytics is very basic and sometimes fails to record properly.

Recommendations to others considering the product

They tend to oversell the features with the software, some were not working when I signed up and others were in the process of being fixed. It's good software at a great price, but be aware that there are lots of bugs still in the software and customer support can be infuriating to work with. Most of my clients are small businesses, new to marketing automation, if you have clients with experience and more advanced needs, this may not be the software for you, I would ask very specific questions before buying.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Being able to connect all the dots from click to sale and making better marketing decisions based on this data.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring does it all. Client management is a dream with this platform. Once leads are created, they are easily managed using drag and drop features. Marketing campaign are easy to setup and promote.

What do you dislike?

I would like the New button to be somewhere else. I forget it's up there and go about adding new clients and opportunities the hard way - by fishing around the top menu bar.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Just do the demo, then you will see the power and ease of the software. It will do everything you need!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our lead nuturing was a bit of a mess, but with SharpSpring, all leads are assigned, easy to update and the whole team can see where each one is in the pipeline.

After switching to SharpSpring, we have definitely been able to be more responsive which has lead to more accepted contracts!

What do you like best?

- The ability to better manage scheduling emails and follow-ups

- Cost-appropriate: we don't NEED a really comprehensive content management system, and therefore don't want to pay an astronomical amount for access to one. For what we are getting out of Sharpspring, it's very worth the cost.

- I find the landing pages builder to be a little lacking now (just hard to build/customize the way I would like), but they are moving in the right direction and I hope to eventually hope to be able to move off of leadpages to keep everything on SharpSpring.

What do you dislike?

- For our business type (b2b, with some big customers but many, many small ones), the lead scoring/tracking leads really isn't that helpful.

- Customer Service could be better. They are generally responsive, but it can take a long time to actually resolve an issue - over a month for an integration issue.

- Customizing the look of forms (particularly for use embedded on various pages) is tough, and there are limitations to it.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Evaluate your needs and determine how many tools you require. Think through your steps clearly: you get a lot of support during onboarding, but not a lot of direction, so you really need to have an outline to drive the conversations and trainings (and book your time in advance!).

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

- We have a new webinar program and are able to better manage the invitations and follow-up of that.

- We previously had very little segmentation of users, and are now better able to bucket our customers and prospects a little better to target them efficiently.

- We can better direct form-fills to the correct person on our side (this is not 100% accurate, as it is reliant on assigning a rep based on state and that occasionally has a delay in updating. However, it's *mostly* on point).

What do you like best?

Sharpspring Support has been a huge help for us with on boarding and learning the platform. Being able to become an authority on this product for our clients has been huge for us.

What do you dislike?

although the support is of a high level, sometimes because we are in a southern hemisphere timezone it's a little hard to get a hold of a specialist.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make full use of the support. the videos and intuitive support is unparalleled. You can solve almost any problem by yourself without having to get a hold of a support person. But when you do need to get hold of someone the support is specialised not only in the platform, but also in marketing. Which gives me confidence as a marketed having someone speak my language.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

automation has been a huge problem solver with the volume of emails we need to send out each day. Also rather than manually tracking the success of the individual emails the platform does it all for us.

What do you like best?

The marketing automatons. They are easy to set up and once you get going can do some pretty ingenious things with. The support that sharp spring offers is also incredible. There has never been a time that I needed support and could not get somebody on the phone to talk it through with me. The customer support also extends to 3rd party apps that plug into the SS api.

What do you dislike?

There is currently not a feature that allows sales teams to work together. It is difficult for example, to assign a a lead to more than one person/user. The UX is a little rudimentary but has gotten better since I have started using it.

Recommendations to others considering the product

For the price, you cant beat the power of SharpSpring.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketing automation that are put into SharpSpring and I don't have to worry about them. The client doesn't either. Some benefits I have realized would have to be the use of the dynamic emails.

What do you like best?

On the face of it, SharpSpring comes with a great set of features both in and outside your typical marketing automation platform. The fact that most things sync together and all under one roof is extremely convenient. The overall UI is attractive and easy to navigate. Unlimited users is a real plus for gaining company-wide engagement.

What do you dislike?

While still a relatively new product, especially in certain areas like landing pages, there a number of bugs still being worked out. I've spent more time chatting with their Support team than I would like. Albeit they were mainly good interactions. The lack of integration between contacts and accounts is an issue for us, as is the lack of flexibility in changing field types and views.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Get a trial first if you can. I didn't push for it, but should have. It would have saved us much time and effort trying to get it to work as a CRM for us. The feature set is good, just be wary that it doesn't go as deep as independent platforms might in the areas of CRM, Email Marketing, Web Visitor ID, etc.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The goal was to bring sales and marketing efforts closer together, and this is working. Though our efforts to make SharpSpring our one and only platform for CRM and MAP, has not worked out. I hope now to see enough benefit from it just as MAP to sustain the purchase long-term.

What do you like best?

The core features are all there, all included in the base price. No surprises. The fact that the CRM is included make even more attractive to clients that are looking to streamline their process. This makes it particularly easy to tie marketing activities to actual sales. This is super important for me.

The new implementation of "Dynamic Content" features that allows us to customize Landing Pages and Emails based information on a leads profile are very interesting. The fact that this can be done without any knowledge of coding really unlocks a lot of potentials.

What do you dislike?

Two things:

More standard reports. While I can get to most anything by exporting data and building reports outside the system, I often find the standard reports limited. Most of the better reports are focused on the CRM/Sales side of the product, I'd love to see more of them on the marketing side of the product.

More automation on the Sales side of the platform. Once a prospect is passed over to sales and becomes an opportunity, it is often difficult to create automation driven by changes in that opportunity.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The key for me is not only generating Marketing Qualified Leads, but also understanding how marketing activity actually impacts sales. I want to know exactly which marketing touch-points were part of every journey that leads to sale. That way, we can put more effort/resources into what is working, and retire (or improve) those that are not.

That is information that has allowed me to help my clients generate more sales while lowering their costs.

What do you like best?

- Continuous stream of added features that are being rolled out (i.e. landing pages & dynamic email have recently been added at no additional monthly cost)

- Flexibility with the software

- Fairly rapid support

What do you dislike?

Lack of some of the tools around top of the funnel content marketing. Would be great to structure / visualise your funnels, including persona development / mapping, easy visual campaign view, and some of the tools around inbound marketing like the keywords / content being used for the campaign. It is mostly for those companies that have already built their DB and need to marketing to it. Can be clunky when you're just starting out, but once you get used to it - it is a breeze.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you want to flexibility, attractive pricepoint / margin and are an agency - this is a great product to consider.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

Let's get straight to the point: the best thing about SharpSpring is cost performance. When it comes to returning a robust marketing automation feature set at this price point, no other platform comes close.

Having worked as a Marketo partner for a few years and flirting on and off with Hubspot, I was blown away when I finally discovered SharpSpring. If you understand how to use marketing automation in a content marketing strategy, every critical feature and all of the flexibility of the other platforms is available in SharpSpring for a fraction of the cost.

What do you dislike?

When you compare side by side, you will find that there are small features available in other platforms that you won't find in SharpSpring. But frankly, in my experience, the vast majority of these features apply to "edge use case" examples that will apply to a small minority of users at best, and, IMO, are foisted in the collateral and lauded by the sales reps more or less as a gimmick than an actual value add.

Are you surprised that a company with a name like Marketo is pretty good at marketing?

For example, if you're doing an evaluation, ask yourself if you really think you're going to use that Revenue Cycle Analytics system. I'm betting your marketing team has better ways to spend their time.

In a nutshell, sure, if your company has "more money than brains" and a dozen marketers with nothing better to do, Marketo was custom built for you. Or if you enjoy reading amazing marketing blog content and want to make a trip to Boston each year to see comedians and pop stars share their marketing expertise, Hubspot may just be the right fit. (You were wondering where your exorbitant "setup" fees are going?)

On the other hand, if you're actually focused on building content marketing programs and need a solid technology backbone to operate and monitor your campaigns that doesn't eat half your budget for breakfast, stop wasting your time, SharpSpring is the droid you've been looking for.

Of course, as a newer platform, SharpSpring does not yet have as many integrations available out of the box as the older platforms. This is something we'd all like to see and SharpSpring promises that they are always working on new integrations. There are, in fact, many existing third party integrations via Zapier, but you will still come across some marketing technologies that already connect to Marketo and Hubspot that aren't yet in the SharpSpring ecosystem. But that said, with the budget you save with an MA like SharpSpring, you can easily cover the cost of a custom integration if necessary.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Do your homework. This comes down to feature set and price. When the sales team at the competitors tell you that this product "can't possibly be that good at that price," you can smirk to yourself knowing that they know that they've lost the sale.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Having lots of anonymous visitors come to your website is nice, but not very useful to your sales team. Wouldn't it be nice to know the contact information of those visitors spending lots of time evaluating your products and services? Wouldn't it be nice if your primary sales problem was not finding new leads, but figuring out how to prioritize among the dozens of warm opportunities available in your pipeline?

Without great content, marketing automation is pointless. So the obvious math here is simple: the more money you spend on your marketing technology, the less spend you dedicate to your content. All things being equal, your technology needs to offer the feature set rich enough to operate your campaigns. But beyond that, the determinative factors for your success are going to be based on the quality of the content you are offering, not on the useless bells and whistles in your technology stack.

B2B content marketing strategy is about developing intelligent content offers that actually return real value to your audiences. To create this kind of content, you need to have a deep understanding of how your value propositions solve your prospects' pain points. You also need to understand what kind of content works best for your audiences and how to get your content in front of those audiences. And finally, you need a way to turn those anonymous audiences into known leads and a way to warm those leads with strategic messaging so your sales team can close more deals.

SharpSpring is the marketing technology we recommend to accomplish the last piece of that puzzle. But you will need a steady and persistent supply of high quality content to do effective marketing automation. My job is to help my clients orchestrate and execute an intelligent strategy that combines both content and technology to deliver high quality marketing communications on a robust marketing technology backbone.

What do you like best?

The concepts that I was sold on were great. CRM and automation tool with tons of features. Good price and resell model.

What do you dislike?

Support is the worst. When calling in I regularly get hung up on. When I do get through to a support specialist, they are rarely able to resolve my problems so I usually end the conversation frustrated and with no follow up. Most recently their system was throwing errors that were actually breaking my client's website. They were made aware of the issue, but still hadn't resolved it.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Ask for more specific examples of functionality. We were very specific with the features we wanted and were assured by the sales team that they were included. Since then we have run into issue after issue including their code breaking client websites.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Making businesses more efficient and effective with lead nurturing and long-term follow-ups to existing customers.

What do you like best?

very average product. It is very difficult to integrate with other platforms - really, they need to work on integrations!

What do you dislike?

BILLING COMPLETELY DECEPTIVE. THEY WONT LET YOU OFF THE HOOK IF THE PRODUCT DOES NOT WORK FOR YOU. WHO DOES THAT? THIS IS A SOFTWARE - ANY OTHER COMPANY WILL LET YOU CANCEL. NOT SHARPSPRING! THEY WANT TO CHARGE FOR AN ADDITIONAL 60 DAYS!!!!

RIDICULOUS - DO NOT PURCHASE!

Recommendations to others considering the product

Need to improve hookups with other platforms - like webinar jam, teachable, etc. It does not connect to anything easily. Unlike infusionsoft which has many integrations. This was a terrible experience AND NOW when we want to cancel they want to charge 60 days! that's ridiculous.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

marketing automation. No benefits, because we could not integrate with other platforms.

What do you like best?

Sharpspring focuses on Agency relationships and they are very serious about it. From the moment I first become a customer to seeing their protective nature in action for my agency it's hard not to love their approach!

What do you dislike?

The infancy of the platform can be challenging at times. Although it's an incredibly full featured package for the price point, there are moments where I'm scratching my head wondering how some seemingly simple things haven't been implemented. The good news is that they are very responsive with requests and seem to be very active with development.

The other downside is the lack of a proper trial license or trial offering of any sort even in a sandboxed environment. Even considering that this software is much cheaper than most of the competition it is still a considerable investment to much of the market that the product targets

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are an agency considering Sharpspring to replace an existing marketing automation platform or CRM you should thoroughly investigate your needs prior to jumping ship (obviously).

If you are an agency that is making their way into marketing automation and CRM implementation Sharpspring is the perfect tool to introduce you to the technologies as well as affordable enough to introduce new prospective clients to it as well.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Sharpspring has the potential to solve a plethora of problems with the diverse feature set but tends to focus on marketing automation. Problems ranging from over burdened sales teams to abandon shopping carts and more Sharpspring's offers an impressive suite of tools to address these as well as many other issues.

What do you like best?

Once we signed up with SharpSpring you are given a 60 day onboarding process. This is where you are assigned to a onboard specialist and he essentially trains you. My onboard specialist was Deontae Lafayette who was fabulous, so knowledgeable and so patient with me. I really liked that I could have as much time with him as I needed. I made two one hour meetings every week. He would train me on something then I would work on that component and then we would review with our next meeting. After my 60 days ended he assured me that the support team is available as I need it. Also, SharpSpring has video tutorials that are accessible anytime I need to figure out how to do something. I really have enjoyed my time with SharpSpring so far as I feel they are really a very knowledgeable company and very easy to work with.

What do you dislike?

I really have not found anything I dislike. Some functions are not in formats i am used to with other platforms but one thing SharpSpring allows you is to send in a product feature that you would like them to consider and so far I have sent in two and they have used my suggestion and made that feature available.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's great tool and relatively inexpensive.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are a PR firm and sent out press releases for our clients. We have used many other platforms but could never put our name to the releases. With SharpSpring it looks like our releases are coming from us and not another mail server.

What do you like best?

The powerfully flexible lead scoring and workflow capabilities for managing new leads are fantastic. We also actively use the ability to view leads' interactions with the website and sales personnel to manage and focus the efforts of the sales team. The on-boarding and online support are great. Also really appreciate the APIs that are made available for integration with other systems.

What do you dislike?

The Analytics reporting is good and they do report site traffic by search engine keyword, but the service does not currently provide lead counts by keyword, which would be nice.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Lead allocation, management and ROI by lead source. The most important benefit realized to date has been the automation of lead assignment and workflows based on lead scoring and lead profiling. We are also currently in the process of utilizing SharpSpring APIs to integrate with the ERP to track leads through to conversion and to identify ROI on lead sources.

What do you like best?

I find the software very intuitive and the customer service responsive. SharpSpring also provides robust support materials for selling and continued education on the product.

What do you dislike?

The email building tool is an 8/10 - sometimes it is unwieldy and will not build exactly the way that we envision. Similarly, the new blog and pages tools are not as smooth as I'd like (but, I know that they are new products.

The biggest issue is on the rare chance we have a support issue, technical support is on an east coast schedule and we are on the west coast.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you're looking to build a multi-touch automated marketing campaign that allows you to track users across emails, landing pages, forms, etc. this is the cost effective, intuitive solution for you.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are maintaining more top of mind awareness with current and past clients. We have been able to resell the product to clients, as well, which brings in new revenue.

What do you like best?

As lead generation experts, we work with many different marketing automation solutions such as Eloqua, Pardot, Marketo, InfusionSoft. We are Certified HubSpot and SharpSpring Partners. Each solution works best depending upon the requirements and budget of the client. HubSpot is superior in functionality and ease of use for the end user, but at a higher price point. SharpSpring is a solid solution for agencies that work with small to mid-sized businesses that require a lower price point.

SharpSpring doesn't have the depth of functionality that other solutions have, but it has more breadth than point solutions such as Constant Contact, which is their sweet spot. SharpSpring provides a broad range of functionality at a reasonable price for businesses that may not otherwise be able to afford it.

What do you dislike?

I think that SharpSpring's main drawback is on ease of use for the non-technical end user. As others have said, it can be glitch-y but so can every other marketing automation platform, especially in their youth (I'm old enough to remember when Salesforce was glitch-y).

Recommendations to others considering the product

For businesses that are looking at SharpSpring, understand your requirements and find a Certified Partner who can help you with discounts, implementation and be your go-to resource as needed. This will greatly lower your frustration (that is normal to feel with any marketing automation solution), improve your success rate and satisfaction.

SharpSpring is young, flexible and very responsive to feedback. They are an excellent choice for agencies looking for an agency-model.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We focus on lead generation and increasing revenue for our clients across a variety of industries. For our clients that fit the target profile for SharpSpring we use it for:

- behavioral based automation

- visitor ID/prospect list

- dynamic content

- automated email nurturing

- lead scoring

- CRM (light functionality but exactly what our clients need and very easy to use)

SharpSpring does the same things higher priced solutions do for our clients (get more leads and more sales, increase loyalty, etc.), but at a price they can afford.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring allow us to, for the first time, plan and implement a hole marketing campaign without an adicional use of other marketing or sales platforms. It gives us their fantastic native CRM and the amazing Land Page Builder, witch able us to change the level of our website and our's clientes too. A game changer.

We've been using for almost 2 years and it evolves a lot.

What do you dislike?

Although its not a problem, there's a need for more social monitoring and interaction.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I recommend.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Negative and unpredictable cash flow. We change to positive and recurrent by improving the relationship with our clientes using the automation.

No sufficient lead generation, no list. We developer a content strategy and use the automation to nurture the leads, and put then in different flows.

What do you like best?

My goal was to find an HubSpot alternative for marketing automation. HubSpot is a great platform and I have zero complaints about their services. The challenge with HubSpot is the pricing model. When a client signs up for HubSpot at $2,400, it creates a challenge to negotiate adequate agency costs. I lost potential clients who could not afford HubSpot plus agency services. SharpSpring has become my alternative for marketing automation, and I think SharpSpring offers equivalent serves compared to HubSpot. The advantage of using SharpSpring is the pricing model that gives agencies control over client pricing.

What do you dislike?

My primary concern with SharpSpring is the complexity of shopping integrations. SharpSpring works flawlessly with Woo Commerce and Shopify, but integration with BigCommerce is a challenge. I’ve reached out to different web design agencies looking for a fix for BigCommerce, and I am still looking for a solution. Once integrated, the SharpSpring shopping features are amazing!

Recommendations to others considering the product

I would recommend taking a close look at SharpSpring as an alternative to popular platforms, like MailChimp and HubSpot

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

SharpSpring provides marketing automation that is cost effective for small and medium sized businesses. I’ve been able to retain more clients and have more revenue directed toward that agency by using SharpSpring marketing automation. Key benefits of SharpSpring are the full collection of marketing tools, including sales features, email marketing, and landing pages.

What do you like best?

I love the price! Sharpspring does a nice job offering a very inexpensive marketing automation platform with a reasonable number of additional features beyond sending email.

What do you dislike?

The application is a little buggy. As a team, we've had to submit a number of support tickets for things that are "supposed to" work or worked before and then aren't working on a particular job. We also wish that the platform was more advanced in terms of allowing us to create beautiful design. For example, confirmation emails on form fills cannot be html and have very limited formatting options - which we deal with but don't like

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We've been able to do event and newsletter registration and invitation. We've also integrated forms on websites and collected inbound leads effectively for new business and recruiting.

What do you like best?

SharpSpring is a sleek system that offers outstanding tools for marketing automation. We researched a lot of platforms ranging from free to $1000s before going with SharpSpring. They have just the right amount of features that makes it the most useful for all of our clients, leaving off the bells and whistles that would inflate the price.

Their interface is top-tier which makes using their system a breeze. The dashboard gives you a comprehensive look at everything you’re running. Moving around the system is super simple and they make it easy to jump to different areas when you’re building a sales program. I’d urge you to check out all the features on their website because there are too many to list, but I can say that what they have offered us is unbelievably comprehensive.

We’ve also taken full advantage of their support which is outstanding. They have always been knowledgable and very friendly. Moreover, they won’t let you off the phone until they are sure that the problem has been resolved! They also offer FREE continuing education programs like webinars to help make you more proficient at their program.

SharpSpring is a superior marketing automation platform, with a very intuitive interface and offer the kind of support we have rarely seen in tech companies. They have worked harder to earn and keep our business than any other vendor we've ever worked with. You would do yourself a giant favor to give their system a test drive.

What do you dislike?

I was not prepared for the steep learning curve that is required to take full advantage of this platform. I was a bit discouraged at first by everything there was to learn but I realized it’s part of working with such a comprehensive platform. It’s like moving to a new town and trying to figure out all the roads and highways. I don’t know if that’s really a “con” but it is something you must be aware of. You’re going to need to spend some serious time learning it but once you do, navigating the system easily becomes second nature.

Recommendations to others considering the product

SharpSpring is a superior marketing automation platform, with a very intuitive interface and offer the kind of support we have rarely seen in tech companies. They have worked harder to earn and keep our business than any other vendor we've ever worked with. You would do yourself a giant favor to give their system a test drive.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

SharpSpring allows me to do unlimited testing and very quickly assess the results of my efforts in multiple ways. I cannot stress "multiple ways" enough. If you're using MailChimp you get to assess your results from an email campaign. If you're running Google analytics you get to assess your results from an engagement perspective, etc. With SharpSpring ALL of your efforts register on your dashboard and you can evaluate them comprehensively. We weren't a super-analytics driven agency before SS but the platform has allowed us to drive our efforts in a much more focused direction. And BTW, our clients LOVE it!

What do you like best?

SharpSpring offers a great platform for marketing automation and much more. When you fully implement SharpSpring you no longer have a need for a separate email system, CRM, or blog. Everything is in one convenient platform and tied together to ensure you don't miss a single opportunity.

What do you dislike?

The editing interface for the emails and landing pages could be improved, especially for more advanced users.

Recommendations to others considering the product

This is a very good software that continues to make updates and improve upon their strong platform.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Implementing the marketing automation and having things happen without requiring staff to manually fire emails, create landing pages, etc. has been very beneficial.

What do you like best?

Sharpspring does not have a CMS - so it is designed to be used with other CMS's and therefore integrates easily with whatever your client already has - in our case this is mostly wordpress. So no dilema about where to host the client website - just carry on as normal. The user interface and setup we find more intuitive and straight forward than other platforms. Signing up with Sharpsing was simple with a personal touch, there is no customer service dip post sale. We found the pricing structure straight forward and simple to dovetail with existing client billing. We have had onboarding with more than one platform - the Sharpspring onboarding was fantastic.

What do you dislike?

There are a couple of minor issues we found as we developed a detailed understanding of the system - certain elements which cannot be customised and a couple of software bugs. The good news is that these were taken on board in a pro-active way and 2 of the 3 issues have been sorted already.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It is definitively worth having a look at

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are delivering inbound marketing campaigns to clients in a more seamless way - one because their CMS is unchanged and two because the platform pricing does not cause a major dent in their marketing budget.

What do you like best?

I absolutely love that I can customize just about anything I want. Custom fields, custom triggers, custom filters, etc. It really gives me the flexibility I need to fit SharpSpring into both the way we do business now and the plans I have for improvement and growth. I don't feel pigeon-holed or trapped because of the CRM we chose.

What do you dislike?

I could use better reporting features. As they stand, the most useful reports pertain to campaigns. I would like to be able to draw out more reports based on my custom fields. Specifically, I'd like to customize the stages of a lead with a custom field and then pull a report based on that information. Currently, I can get that data in form of CSV files and manipulate it but that is an additional step.

Recommendations to others considering the product

You're going to need to spend a lot of time to get set this up and truly realize the full compliment of benefits. I admittedly got overwhelmed doing it myself and had to bring in help from another department. I would recommend doing it in stage. Set up what you need to meet your current operations 1 for 1. Then move into all of the improvements and customizations that will really help your business take off. Their "guide" recommended this but it's hard to stick to when there's just so much you can do.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

My company has 8 different physical locations so I am able to generate lists for each location, allowing them to get a nice concise view of their leads. We are able to see where leads came from, attribute them to campaigns through automation, and get a real cost per lead. Based on the behavior of leads (page views, email opens, etc.) we can then tailor both or email interactions and personal interactions.

I also made a make-shift customer support ticker tracker to assign support issues to the appropriate location. This has cut down on lost complaints. Lost complaints turn into escalated complaints and at that point customers are too angry to save and want a refund.

What do you like best?

It so easy to manage with contacts. Once they coming inside our system, it allow us to track each touch point of them, since a single view in a landing page to a comment in our blog, the overall view of each step the client journey help us a lot to be in touch with then in proper way.

What do you dislike?

We cant see a robust social media feature witch allow us to deal with the interactions on Social Media and we cant also publish or schedule posts and share content. For that its necessary other tools and other expenses.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It helps us to deal with our clients in a better way.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Using the Email Dynamic feature, it makes our lives in terms of email marketing so much easier, once it can be used in a optimum way delivering pieces of content made directly for each kind of persona, avoiding that we have to use and create a lot of emails and workflows. The benefits are tremendous once we do the job only one time.

What do you like best?

The email triggers and mailing lists are great, as well creating an easily managed email list. It's also easy to make a workflow for each of the triggers that clients may go through. There are many video and written tutorials for different parts of the website, which makes it easy to find whatever you might look for.

What do you dislike?

Personas don't seem to make sense to me for our purposes, and the emails are difficult to design. Websites are also difficult to manage, and it isn't easy to change any of the design. It

Recommendations to others considering the product

Look up different tutorials to go through the website, that way you understand how to implement each of the different aspects.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Able to easily get the make workflows and organize contact lists. It also takes away any guess work when it comes to who gets emails, notifications, and URLs to different access.